April 2005

Using PDF for More Effective Business Communications
By Elizabeth Kricfalusi

When I moved to the Bay Area a couple of years ago, I had not yet sold my house in Canada. So when an offer came in, my real estate agent did the normal thing—she faxed me the offer. Unfortunately, the original documents were legal size, and my fax machine only accepted letter-sized paper, so the papers would shrink during transmission. Multiply that by the number of counter offers, with scratched-out clauses and scribbled initials, and you can see the final state of what was, frighteningly, my binding legal contract.

Now imagine the difference if the transaction had been conducted using Portable Document Format (PDF) files. There would have been no resizing, the text would have remained legible during each iteration, and both parties could have used digital signatures to acknowledge agreement to any edits. I would have had a nice clean copy on my computer that I could view or print at any time.

Although Adobe Acrobat has been around for more than ten years, many people still aren’t aware of the benefits of PDF for exchanging and collaborating on important business documents. Consultants in particular can benefit from using PDF—from simply sharing files and reviewing content to conducting transactions and managing archives.

PDF files are created with Adobe Acrobat—not to be confused with the free Adobe Reader, which is used for viewing and printing PDF documents.

Compatibility confidence

With the wide variety of business applications now available, document authors can’t be certain that every recipient will have the appropriate software and version needed to open their source files. After all, you can hardly mandate that your client fork out thousands of dollars just to be able to do business with you.

However, virtually every computer sold today—including the most popular handheld devices—has a copy of the latest version of Adobe Reader already installed. (And if you don’t have it yet, you can download the software for free from the Adobe Website.) You can be confident that your recipient will actually be able to open, view, and print your files.

Tip: Since documents from almost any application with a Print function can be converted to PDF, you can combine multiple file types, such as marketing copy, financial reports, graphics—even Web pages—into a single document, regardless of page size or layout. And if your recipient actually needs the source document, you can easily attach it to your PDF file as well, to keep all related files in one convenient, compact, electronic package.

Reliable reviewing

Many consultants produce documents that need to be reviewed by their colleagues, clients, or partners, such as layouts, presentations, and business strategy recommendations. Many applications lack a convenient way to add comments to documents, so reviewers have limited options: printing out and marking up hard copies; compiling a list of notes in an email; or, worse, making their changes directly on the original content, possibly without your awareness. The more reviewers you have, the more difficult it is to manage everyone’s comments.

Using Acrobat, you can add a variety of comment types onto PDF documents without affecting the original content. For example, you might place a note at the top of the page that provides a summary of your overarching comments, then use the highlighting or text edit tools to make specific wording suggestions. You can also consolidate comments from multiple reviewers into a single document to resolve outstanding questions or conflicting directions.

Tip: The latest version of Acrobat lets you “turn on” hidden functionality in your PDF files so that reviewers can use the commenting tools even if they only have the free Adobe Reader.

Trusted transactions

Per my real-estate story, documents are fundamentally important to business transactions such as contract terms and conditions, purchase orders, and invoices. Using PDF can save you time and money by letting you email these documents to your suppliers and customers. PDF files also provide a number of security features including setting restrictions on copying and modifying content and adding digital signatures to approve the transaction. You don’t need to have a full-scale security infrastructure with digital certificates in place; a built-in self-sign function can alert you if any changes have been made since you added your signature.

Tip: PDF forms are a great alternative to HTML for gathering visitor data from your Website. Simply create the form in any authoring application, like Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator, and then add standard fields using Acrobat. Customers can download the forms to their own computers and fill them out at their convenience. The fields created in Acrobat then enable that data to be easily extracted and imported into a spreadsheet or database for analysis or list creation.

Accessible archives

Ever tried looking through drawers of paper files for a statistic you know you used in a project a couple of years ago? PDF files provide full-text search capabilities so you can retrieve what you’re looking for quickly, even searching through entire folders on your hard drive. And because PDF is becoming accepted as a standard file format (endorsed by a number of standards organizations for specific purposes), you can be confident that even years from now you’ll still be able to access the files you create today.

Tip: You can use PDF to create electronic records of online purchases and registration confirmations. Since the “thank you” pages are usually dynamically generated, they can’t be bookmarked. And even though most online vendors send a confirmation email, I find that keeping my PDF receipts in a separate folder on my hard drive makes it easier to locate them when needed (e.g.; at tax time).

Now that you’ve seen how Acrobat and PDF can help you share and manage your important business documents, why not try it out for yourself? Adobe offers a free 30-day tryout version of Acrobat Professional on their Website.

With PDF, you’ll never again need to rely on “just the fax.”

Elizabeth Kricfalusi of Valley Scribe is a freelance corporate writer and editor working in San Jose. Email: elizabeth@valleyscribe.com Website: www.valleyscribe.com